The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2019 Edition

The Buried Giant ^{Lavie Tidhar}

When I was five or six years old, my best friend was Mowgai Khan, who was Aislinn Khan’s youngest. He was a spidery little thing, “full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. His eyes shone like blackberries in late summer. When he was very small, the Khans undertook the long, hard journey to Tyr, along the blasted planes, and in that settlement Mowgai was equipped with a composite endoskeleton, which allowed him to walk, in however curious a fashion. On the long summer days, which seemed never to end, Mowgai and I would roam freely over the Land, collecting wild berries by the stream or picking pine nuts from the fallen cones in the forest, and we would debate for hours the merits or otherwise of Elder Simeon’s intricate clockwork automatons, and we would try to catch fish in the stream, but we never did catch anything.

It was a long, hot summer: the skies were a clear and uninterrupted lavender blue, with only smudges of white cloud on the horizon like streaks of paint, and when the big yellow sun hung high in the sky we would seek shelter deep in the forest, where the breeze stirred the pine needles sluggishly and where we could sit with our backs to the trunks of old mottled pines, between the roots, eating whatever lunch we had scavenged at home in the morning on our way. Eating dark bread and hard cheese and winter kimchee, we felt we knew all the whole world, and had all the time in it, too: it is a feeling that fades and can never return once lost, and all the more precious for that. For dessert we ate slices of watermelon picked only an hour or so earlier from the ground. The warm juice ran down our chins and onto our hands and we spat out the small black pips on the ground, where they stared up at us like hard eyes.

And we would story.

Mowgai was fascinated by machines. I, less so. Perhaps it was that he was part machine himself, and thus felt an affinity to the old world that I did not then share. My mother, too, was like that, going off for days and months on her journeys to the fallow places, to scavenge and salvage. But for her I think it was a practical matter, as it is for salvagers. She felt no nostalgia for the past, and often regarded the ancients’ fallen monuments as monstrous follies, vast junkyards of which precious little was of any use. It was my father who was the more romantic of the two, who told me stories of the past, who sometimes dreamed, I think, of other, different times. Salvagers are often hard and durable, like the materials they repurpose and reuse. Mowgai’s dream was to become a salvager like my mother, to follow the caravans to the sunken cities in the sea or to the blasted plains. His journey to Tyr had changed him in some profound fashion, and he would talk for hours of what he saw there, and on the way.

Usually after our lunch we would head on out of the trees, toward the misshapen hills that lay to the northwest of us. These hills were shaped in an odd way, with steep rises and falls and angular lines, and Elder Simeon made his home at their base.

When he saw us approach that day he came out of his house and wiped his hands on his leather apron and smiled out of his tanned and lined face. They said he had clockwork for a heart, and he and Mowgai often spoke of mechanical beings and schematics in which I had little interest. His pets, too, came out, tiny clockwork automata of geese and ducks, a tawny peacock, a stealthy prowling cat, a caterpillar and a turtle.

“Come, come!” he said. “Little Mai and Mowgai!” And he led us to his courtyard and set to brewing tea. Elder Simeon was very old, and had traveled widely as a young man all about the Land, for a restless spirit had taken hold of him then. But now he valued solitude, and stillness, and he seldom came out of his home, and but for us, received few visitors.

He served us tea, with little slices of lemon from the tree in his yard, and then we sat down together to story, which is what we do in the Land.

“You have gone to Tyr,” he said to Mowgai, and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Have you ever seen, on your way through the blasted plains, a town, standing peacefully in the middle of nowhere?”

Mowgai stirred, surprised, and said that no, he hadn’t, and he did not think anything still lived in the blasted plains.

“Life finds a way,” Elder Simeon said. “There is life there of all sorts, snakes and scorpions and lizards, sage and marigolds and cacti. But the town… well, they say there is a town, Mowgai, little Mai. I had heard of it in Tyr, where they say it sits there still, out on the plains, as perfect and as orderly as it had always been. No one goes near it, and no one comes out…”

It is just an old men’s tale, I think, and you know how they love to embellish and gossip.

But this is the story. It is told in a curious sort of way. It is told in the plural, by a mysterious “we,” but who these “we” are, or were, no one now remembers. Perhaps “they” are still in the town, but though many claim to have seen it, its location always seems to change like a mirage in the telling.

“Once,” began Elder Simeon, “there was a little boy…”

Once there was a little boy who lived in a house with two kindly parents and a cheerful little dog, and they all loved him very much. The dog’s name was Rex, and all dogs in their town, which was a very lovely and orderly town indeed, were called that. Mother was tall and graceful and never slept at all, and Father was strong and patient and sang very beautifully. Their house too was very lovely and very clean. The boy’s name was Oli, which was carefully chosen by algorithm from a vast dictionary of old baby names.

The town was called the Town. It was a carefully built town of white picket fences and single-story houses and wide avenues and big open parks with many trees. The boy would go for a walk in the park with his parents every day, and he could always hear the humming of many insects and see beautiful butterflies flittering among the trees.

Really it was quite an idyllic childhood in many ways.

It had to be, of course.

It was very carefully designed.

You can probably see where this is going.

The shape of stories is difficult for us. We understand them as patterns, what you’d call a formula. We tell the story of Oli’s childhood in a way designed to be optimal, yet there are always deviations, margins of error that can creep in.

For instance, there was the matter of the purple caterpillar.

The purple caterpillar was very beautiful, Oli thought. It was a long, thin insect with many prolegs, brightly colored in purple with bright yellow spots. It crawled on the thin green leaf of a flowering helleborine, and it did that, back and forth, back and forth, every day on Oli’s passing through the park. When Oli was not in the park, of course, the caterpillar stopped moving. Oli became quite unreasonably—we felt—fascinated by the caterpillar, and every day on his journey through the park he would stop for long minutes to examine the little creature, despite his father calling him to come along to the swings, or his mother asking him to hold her hand so he could hop over the pond.

But Oli would just squat there and stare at the caterpillar, as it moved back and forth, back and forth across the leaf.

Why did the caterpillar crawl back and forth, back and forth across the leaf? Oli wondered. His parents, who were not used to children, were a little taken aback to discover that why was one of Oli’s favorite words. Why did the clouds make shapes in the sky? Why did Rex never bark? Why was water wet? Why did Oli sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, uneasy, and tried and tried to listen to the night sounds of the Town all around him, only there were none?

Some of these questions we could answer, of course—clouds made shapes because the human mind has been programmed by long evolution to make patterns, for instance: just like stories. Water is “wet” in its liquid form, but the word only describes the experience of water, not its properties; the town was quiet, and Rex never barked, because Oli was meant to be asleep at that time.

The caterpillar crawled like that every day under Oli’s gaze, but children, as we found, are almost unreasonably inquisitive, and therefore one day Oli simply grabbed the little creature by its body and lifted it off the leaf.

The caterpillar struggled feebly between Oli’s thumb and forefinger.

“Don’t touch that!” Mother said sharply, but Oli didn’t really pay her much mind. He stared at the caterpillar, fascinated. The creature emitted a high-pitched shriek of alarm. Oli, who like all children could also be cruel, pressed harder on the caterpillar’s thin membranous body. The creature began to hiss and smoke, its antennae moving frantically as it tried to escape. Oli pressed harder and the caterpillar’s membrane burst.

“Ow!” said Oli, and threw the caterpillar on the ground. The creature had got very hot just before its demise, and left a small burn mark on the epidermis of Oli’s thumb and forefinger. Mother cried out, horrified at this damage, but Oli stuck his fingers in his mouth and sucked them, still staring at the caterpillar.

Thin wires protruded from the caterpillar’s broken body, and faint traces of blue electricity could still be seen traversing the wires before they, too, faded. Oli reached down, more carefully this time, and prodded the body with the tip of his finger. It had already cooled, so he picked it up again and studied it. He had never seen the inside of a living creature before.

That evening Oli had many more questions, and we were not sure how to answer them yet and so we did what grown-ups always do, and didn’t. This was perhaps a mistake, but we were unsure how to proceed. The next morning the caterpillar was back on its leaf like it had always been, crawling up and down, up and down, but Oli studiously ignored it, and we were relieved.

For the next few days Oli was his usual self. Rex often accompanied him on his walks through the park, fetching sticks of wood that Oli threw, and watching patiently as Oli sat on the swing while Father pushed him, up and down, up and down, but never too fast or too high as to pose danger to the child. Oli thought about the sensation he felt when he’d burned his finger. It was pain, something all parents are eager to prevent their children from experiencing, though we are not sure we quite understand it, as it is merely a warning system for the body, or that’s what we always thought.

There were other children in the playground in the park, who Oli saw every day. They dutifully swung on the swings (but one was always free for Oli) and slid down the slides, and climbed on the wood posts and rocked up and down, up and down on the seesaws. They were always very fond of Oli but he found their company boring, because all they ever said were things like, “I love mommy!” and “Let’s play!” and “This is fun!”

They all had dogs named Rex.

And so Oli, while we thought he had forgotten the caterpillar, had in fact been hatching a plan. And so one day when he was playing with one of the other children, who was called Michael, on the tree house, Oli pushed him, and Michael fell. He fell very gracefully, but nevertheless he fell, and he scraped his knee very badly, and Oli saw how the oily blood briefly came out of the wound before the tiny mites inside Michael’s body crawled out to repair the damage done. And also Michael never cried, because we had not thought crying a good thing to teach the other children to do, the children who were not Oli. And then Oli did something very brave and foolish, and he fell down himself, on purpose, and he hurt himself. And he looked down and saw blood, and he began to cry.

Well, Mother and Father were dreadfully upset, and they fussed over Oli, and for a few days he was not allowed to go outside because of his wound, and all he did was sit in his room, and listen to the silence of the town, because no one was out when Oli was not, and he became afraid of the silence, and of how empty the world felt all around him, and when Mother or Father came to talk to him or hold him, he pushed them away.

“Are you my real parents?” he asked them, and they did not know what to say. Only Rex kept him company in that time.

What we mean to say is, Oli knew he was different, but he didn’t quite know how. He knew everyone else was, in a way, better than him. We didn’t feel pain and we didn’t cry and we were always kind and patient, when he could be hasty and cruel. We weren’t sure how to feel things, apart from a great sense of obligation to the child, for him to have the very best life and to be happy. He was very important to us. It was also at that time that Oli saw his parents in the bedroom. He peeked in through a door open just a fraction and saw Father standing motionless by the window, in the moonlight, unnaturally still because he had shut off; and he saw Mother with her chest cavity open, and the intricate machinery glowing and crawling inside, as she performed a minor repair on herself.

This was when he decided to run away to become a real boy.

Of course, you see the problem there.

Oli stole out in the middle of the night, with only Rex for company. He walked through eerily quiet streets, where nothing stirred and nothing moved. It was our fault. We should have operated the town continuously, let people walk around outside and dogs bark and owls hoot, but it just seemed like a waste of energy when the town was first conceived: when Oli himself, of course, was conceived.

Also we are not sure what the hooting of owls sounds like, or what the creatures themselves resembled. A lot of the old records were lost.

The moon was up that night. It had been broken long before, and it hung crooked in the sky, a giant lump of misshapen rock with the scars of old battles on its pockmarked face. It bathed the world in silver light. Oli’s footsteps echoed alone as he walked through the town. We should have been more vigilant, of course, but we did not have much experience in the raising of children. Mother and Father were in their room, having put Oli to sleep and kissed him good night. They thought him long asleep, and now stood motionless in their bedroom, caught like statues in the moonlight. The moonlight shone down on the park and its insects, on the storage sheds where we kept the dummy children who played with Oli, on the too-big houses where no one lived, on the dogs who were asleep in their yards, frozen until such a time as they might be needed again.

We didn’t think Oli would really leave.

We waited for him on the edge of the town. He was a very determined boy. He saw us standing there. We looked just like Mrs. Baker, the friendly neighbor who worked in the grocery shop, whom Oli had known since birth.

“Hello, Mrs. Baker,” he said.

“Hello, Oli,” we said.

“I’m leaving,” he said.

“Why?” we said.

“I’m not like everyone else,” he said. “I’m different.”

Gently, we said, “We know.”

We loved him very much at that moment. There was a 56.998 percent chance of Oli dying if he left the town, and we didn’t want that at all.

“I want to be a real boy,” he said.

“You are a real boy,” we said.

“I want to be like Mother, and Father, and Michael, and you, Mrs. Baker.”

At that moment I think we realized that this was the point in the story of childhood where they learn something painful, something true.

“We can’t always get what we want,” we told him. “The world isn’t like that, Oli. It isn’t like the town. It is still rough and unpredictable and dangerous. We can’t be you. We don’t even truly understand what it is to be you. All we have are approximations.”

He nodded, seriously. He was a serious boy. He said, “I’m still going, but I’ll come back. Will you please tell Mother and Father that I love them?”

“We love you, too,” we told him. We think maybe he understood, then. But we can never truly know. All we have are simulations.

“Come on, boy,” Oli said.

Rex whined, looking up at his master; but he couldn’t go beyond the boundary of the town.

“We’re sorry,” we said.

Oli knelt by his dog and stroked his fur. There was water in the boy’s eyes, a combination of oils and mucins and hormones such as prolactin. But he wiped away his tears.

“Good-bye, Rex,” he said. The dog whined. Oli nodded, seriously, and turned away.

This was how Oli left us, alone, on his quest to become a real boy: with the town silent behind him, with the broken moon shining softly overhead, with us watching him leave. There is an old poem left from before, from long before, about the child walking away… about the parent letting them go.

We think we were sad, but we really don’t know.

We waved, but he never turned back and saw us.

“This is a very strange story, Elder Simeon,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is very old, from when the world was different.”

“Were there really thinking machines in those days?” Mowgai asked, and Elder Simeon shrugged.

“We are thinking machines,” he said.

“But what happened to the boy?” I said. “What happened to Oli?”

“They tell no stories of his journey in Tyr,” Elder Simeon said. “Nor in Suf or in the floating islands. But old Grandma Toffle tells the tale…” But here he fell silent, and his mechanical duck waddled up to him and tucked its head under Elder Simeon’s arm, and its golden feathers shone in the late afternoon sun. “It’s just a story,” Elder Simeon said reluctantly.

We left him then, and wended our way back across the fields and over the brook to the houses. That night, after the sun had set and the lanterns were lit over our homes, I felt very grateful that I was not like that strange boy, Oli, and that I lived in a real place, that I lived on the Land itself and not in something that only mimicked it. But I felt sad for him, too: and Mowgai and I sought out old Grandma Toffle, who sat by the fire, warming her hands, for all that it was summer, and we asked her to tell us the story of the boy.

“Who told you that nonsense?” she said. “It wasn’t old Simeon, was it?”

We admitted, somewhat sheepishly, that it was, and she snorted. “The old fool. There is nothing wrong with machines in their rightful place, but to fill your heads with such fancy! Listen. There was never such a city, and if there was, it has long since rotted to the ground. Old Simeon may speak of self-repairing mechanisms and whatnot, but the truth is that decay always sets in. Nothing lasts forever, children. The ancients built cities bigger than the sky, and weapons that could kill the Earth and almost did, at that. But do you see their airplanes flying through the sky? Their cities lie in ruins. The old roads are abandoned. Life continues as it always did. The mistake we’d always made was to think ourselves the most important species. But the planet doesn’t care if humans live or die upon it. It is just as important to be human as it is to be an ant, or a stinging nettle.”

“But… but we can think,” said Mowgai.

Old Grandma Toffle snorted again. “Think!” she said. “And where did that ever get you?”

“But we can tell stories,” I said quietly.

“Yes…” she said. “Yes. That we can. Very well. What was your question again?”

“Do you know what happened to the boy, Oli, when he left the town?”

“Know? No, I can’t say as that I know, little Mai.”

“Then…”

Her eyes twinkled in the light of the fire, much as Elder Simeon’s did in the sun. When she smiled, there were dimples on her cheeks, making her appear momentarily younger. She said, “Sit down, children. Sit down, and let me tell you. The boy wandered for a long time….”

The boy wandered for a long time away from the town. He missed his parents, and his dog, and everyone. The world beyond the town was very different from everything he’d ever known. It was a rough place at that time, which was not that long after the great floods and the collapse of the old world, and many of the springs were poisoned, and the animals hostile and deadly, and flocks of wild drones flew against darkening skies, and unexploded ordnance lay all about and some of it was…

Not exactly smart, but…

Cunning.

He went for a long time without food or water, and he’d grown weak when he met the Fox and the Cat. They were not exactly a fox and a cat. One was a sort of mobile infiltration unit, designed for stealth, and the other was a stubby little tank. They were exactly the sort of unsuitable companions the Town had worried about when it let the boy go.

“Hello, young sir!” said the Cat.

“Who… who is it?” said the Fox. “Who dares… walk the paths of the dead?”

“My name’s Oli,” said Oli. He looked at them with curiosity, for he had never seen such machines before.

“I have never met an Oli,” said the Cat.

“I have never tasted an Oli,” said the Fox, somewhat wistfully.

“Please,” said Oli, “I am very hungry and very tired. Do you know where I could find shelter?”

The Fox and the Cat communicated silently with each other, for they, too, were very hungry, though their sustenance was of another kind.

“We know… a place,” said the Fox.

“Not very far,” said the Cat.

“Not… not far at all,” said the Fox.

“We could show it to you,” said the Cat.

“Show it to… you,” said the Fox.

“Shut up!” said the Cat.

“Shut… oh,” said the Fox.

“A place of many miracles,” said the Fox, with finality.

And Oli, though he couldn’t be said to have trusted these two strange machines, agreed.

They traveled for a long time through that lost landscape, and the wasteland around them was slowly transformed as the sun rose and set and rose again. Soon they came to the outskirts of a vast city, of a kind Oli had never seen and that only salvagers now see. It was one of the old cities, and as it was still not that long after the fall of the cities, much of it still remained. They passed roads choked with transportation pods like weeds growing through the cracks, and vast grand temples where once every manner of thing had been for sale. Broken houses littered the sides of the streets and towers lay on their sides, and the little tank that was the Cat rolled over the debris while the Fox snuck around it, and all the while Oli struggled to keep up.

The city was very quiet, though things lived in it, as the Fox and the Cat well knew. Predatory things, dangerous things, and they looked upon Oli with hatred in their seeing apparatus, for they hated all living things. Yet these were small, rodentlike constructions, the remnants of a vanished age, who loved and hated their fallen masters in equal measure, and mourned them when they thought no one was looking their way. And they were scared of the Fox and of the Cat, who were battle hardened, and so the unlikely trio passed through that city unharmed.

At last they came to a large forest, and went amid the trees.

“Not far now,” said the Cat.

“To the place of… of miracles,” said the Fox.

“What is this place?” asked Oli.

The Fox and the Cat communicated silently.

“It is a place where no machines can go,” the Cat said at last; and it sounded wistful and full of resentment at once. “Where trees grow from the ground and water flows in the rivers and springs. Where the ground is fertile and the sun shines on the organic life-forms and gives them sustenance. Plants! Flowers! People… useless, ugly things!”

But the Fox said, “I… like flowers,” and it sounded wistful only, with no hate. And the Cat glared at it but said nothing. And so they traveled on, deep into the forest, where the manshonyagger lived.

“What’s a manshonyagger?” said Mowgai, and as he spoke the word, I held myself close and felt cold despite the fire in the hearth. And old Grandma Toffle said, “The man hunters, which roamed the earth in those days after the storms and the wars, and hunted the remnants of humanity. They were sad machines, I think now, driven crazy with grief for the world, and blinded by their programming. They were not evil, so much as they were made that way. In that forest lived such a manshonyagger, and the Fox and the Cat were taking the unwitting Oli to see it, for it had ruled in that land for a very long time, and was powerful among all the machines, and they knew they could get their heart’s desire from it, if only they could give it what it wanted, which was a human.”

“But what did the Fox and the Cat want?” asked Mowgai.

Old Grandma Toffle shrugged. “That,” she said, “nobody knows for sure.”

Stories, I find, are like that. Things don’t turn out the way they’re supposed to, people’s motivations aren’t clear, machines exceed their programming. Odd bits are missing. I often find myself thinking about the Fox and the Cat, these days, with the nights lengthening. Were they bad, or did we just misunderstand them? They had no regard for Oli’s life; but then, did we expect them to? They learned only from their masters, and their masters were mostly gone.

In any case, they came to the forest, and deep within the forest, in the darkest part, they heard a sound….

“What was that?” said Oli.

“It was nothing,” said the Cat.

“N-nothing,” said the Fox.

The sound came again, and Oli, who was near passing out from exhaustion and hunger, nevertheless pressed on, toward its source. He passed through a thick clump of trees and saw a house.

The house stood alone in the middle of the forest, and it reminded him of his own home, which he had started to miss very much, for the ruined houses of the city they had passed earlier were nothing at all like it. This was a small and pleasant farmhouse, built of white stones, mottled with moss and ivy, and in the window of the house there was a little girl with turquoise hair.

“Please,” said Oli. “May I come in?”

“No…” whispered the Fox, and the Cat hissed, baring empty bomb canisters.

“Go away,” said the little girl with turquoise hair. “I am dead.”

“How can you be dead?” said Oli, confused.

“I am waiting for my coffin to arrive,” said the little girl. “I have been waiting for so long.”

“Enough!” cried the Cat, and the Fox rolled forward threateningly, and the two machines made to grab Oli before he could enter the sphere of influence of the house.

“Let me go!” cried Oli, who was afraid. He looked beseechingly up at the little girl in the window. “Help me!” he said.

But the Cat and the Fox were determined to bring Oli to the manshonyagger, and they began to force the boy away from the house. He looked back at the girl in the window. He saw something in her eyes then, something old, and sad. Then, with a sigh, and a flash of turquoise, she became a mote of light and glided from the house and came to land, unseen, on Oli’s shoulder.

“Perhaps I am not all dead,” she said. “Perhaps there is a part of me that’s stayed alive, through all the long years—”

But at that moment, the earth trembled, and the trees bent and broke, and a sound like giant footsteps echoed through the forest. Oli stopped fighting his captors, and the Fox and the Cat both looked up—and up—and up—and the Cat said, “It’s here, it’s heard our cries!” and the Fox said, with reverence, “Manshonyagger…”

“But just what is a manshonyagger?” demanded Mowgai.

Old Grandma Toffle smiled, rocking in her chair, and we could see that she was growing sleepy. “They could take all sorts of shapes,” she said, “though this one was said to look like a giant metal human being….”

The giant footsteps came closer and closer, until a metal foot descended without warning from the heavens and crushed the house of the little girl with the turquoise hair, burying it entirely. From high above there was a creaking sound, and then a giant face filled the sky as it descended and peered at them curiously. Though how it could be described as “curious” it is hard to say, since the face was metal and had no moving features from which to form expressions.

Oli shrank into himself. He wished he’d never left the town, and that he’d listened to Mrs. Baker and turned back and gone home. He missed Rex.

He missed, he realized, his childhood.

“A human…!” said the manshonyagger.

“We want…” said the Fox.

“We want what’s ours!” said the Cat.

“What was… promised,” said the Fox.

“We want the message sent back by the Exilarch,” said the Cat.

The giant eyes regarded them with indifference. “Go back to the city,” the manshonyagger said. “And you will find the ending to your story. Go to the tallest building, now fallen on its side, from whence the ancient ships once went to orbit, and climb into the old control booth at its heart, and there you will find it. It is a rock the size of a human fist, a misshapen lump of rock from the depths of space.”

Then, ignoring them, the giant machine reached down and picked Oli up, very carefully, and raised him to the sky.

Below, the Cat and the Fox exchanged signals; and they departed at once, toward the city. But what this message was that they sought, and who the Exilarch was, I do not know, and it belongs perhaps in another story. They never made it either. It was a time when people had crept back into the blighted zones, a rough people more remnants of the old days than of ours, and they had begun to hunt the old machines and to destroy them. The Cat and the Fox fell prey to such an ambush, and they perished; and this rock from the depths of space was never found, if indeed it had ever existed.

Oli, meanwhile, found himself high above the world….

“But this is just a story, right?” said Mowgai. “I mean, there aren’t really things like manshonyaggers. There can’t be!”

“Do you want me to stop?” said old Grandma Toffle.

“No, no, I just…”

“There were many terrible things done in the old days,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Were there really giant, human-shaped robots roaming the Earth in those days? That I can’t honestly tell you. And was there really a little dead girl with turquoise hair? That, too, I’m sure I can’t say, Mowgai.”

“But she wasn’t really a little girl, was she?” I said. “She wasn’t that at all.”

“Very good, little Mai,” said old Grandma Toffle.

“She was a fairy!” said Mowgai triumphantly.

“A simulated personality, yes,” said old Grandma Toffle. “Bottled up and kept autonomously running. Such things were known, back then. Toys, for the children, really. Only this one somehow survived, grew old as the children it was meant to play with had perished.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“Things were awful back then,” said old Grandma Toffle complacently. “Now, do you want to hear the rest of it? There’s not that long to go.”

“Please,” said Mowgai, though he didn’t really look like he wanted to hear any more.

“Very well. Oli looked down, and…”

Oli looked down, and the entire world was spread out far below. He could see the shimmering blue sea in the distance, and the ruined city, and the blasted plains. And far in the distance he thought he could see the place the Cat and the Fox spoke of, the place of miracles: it was green and brown and yellow and blue, a land the like of which had not been seen in the world for centuries or more. It had rivers and fields and forests, insects and butterflies and people, and the sun shone down on wheat and fig trees, cabbages and daisies. And on little children—children just like you.

It was the Land, of course.

And Oli longed to go there.

“A human child,” said the giant robot. Its eyes were the size of houses. “It has been so long….”

“What will… what will you do with me?” said Oli, and there was only a slight tremor in his voice.

“Kill…” said the robot, though it sounded uncertain.

“Please,” said Oli. “I don’t even know how to be a real boy. I just want to… I just want to be.”

“Kill…” said the robot. But it sounded dubious, as though it had forgotten what the word meant.

Then the little girl with turquoise hair shot up from Oli’s shoulder in a shower of sparks, startling him, and hovered between him and the giant robot.

“What she said to the manshonyagger,” said old Grandma Toffle, “nobody knows for certain. Perhaps she saw in the robot the sort of child she never got the chance to play with. And perhaps the robot, too, was tired, for it could no longer remember why it was that it was meant to hunt humans. The conference between the little fairy and the giant robot lasted well into the night; and Oli, having seen the sun set over the distant Land, eventually fell asleep, exhausted, in the giant’s palm.”

And here she stopped, and sat back in her rocking chair, and closed her eyes.

“Grandma Toffle?” I said.

“Grandma Toffle!” said Mowgai.

But old Grandma Toffle had begun, not so gently, to snore. And we looked at each other, and Mowgai tried to pull on her arm, but she merely snorted in her sleep and turned her head away. And so we never got to hear the end of the story from her.

That summer long ago, I roamed across the Land with Mowgai, through hot days that seemed never to end. We’d pick berries by the stream, and watch the adults in the fields, and try to catch the tiny froglets in the pond with our fingers, though they always slipped from our grasp. Mowgai, I think, identified with Oli much more than I did. He would retell the story to me, under the pine trees, in the cool of the forest, with the soft breeze stirring the needles. He would wonder and worry, and though I kept telling him it was only a story, it had become more than that for him. One day we went to visit Elder Simeon at his house in the foot of the hills. When he saw us coming, he emerged from his workshop, his clockwork creations waddling and crawling and hopping after him. He welcomed us in. His open yard smelled of machine oil and mint, and from there we could see the curious hills and their angular sides. It was then—reluctantly, I think—that he told us the rest of the story.

“The robot and the fairy spoke long into the night,” he said, “and what arrangement they at last reached, nobody knows for sure. That morning, very early, before the sun rose, the manshonyagger began to stride across the blasted plains. With each stride it covered an enormous distance. It crushed stunted trees and poisonous wells and old human dwellings, long fallen into ruin, and the tiny machines down below fled from its path. The girl with turquoise hair was with him, residing inside his chest, where people keep their hearts. The manshonyagger strode across the broken land, as the sun rose slowly in the sky and the horizon grew lighter, and all the while the little boy slept soundly in the giant’s palm.

“And, at last, they came to the Land.”

“They came… they came here?” Mowgai said.

“And the manshonyagger looked down on the rivers and fields, and the fruit trees and the tiny frogs, and of course the people, our ancestors who fled here with the fall of the old world, and it never knew such a Land, and it thought that perhaps the old days were truly gone forever. And it was very tired. And so, with the little girl—who was not at all a little girl, of course, but something not a little like the manshonyagger—whispering in its heart, it laid the boy down, right about here.” And he pointed down to the ground, at his yard, and smiled at our expressions. “And the boy grew up to be a man, among his kind, though there was always, I think, a little bit of him that was also part machine. And he became a salvager, like your mother, Mai, and he spent much of his time out on the blasted plains, and some said he sought his old home, still, but always in vain.

“You won’t find him in our cemetery, though. He disappeared one day, in old age, and after he had begat two children, a little girl and a little boy. It was on a salvaging expedition out on the plains, and some say he died at the hands of the rogue machines that still lived there, but some say he finally found that which he was looking for, and he went back to his perfect home, and had one last childhood in that town where the past is eternally preserved. But that, I think, is just a story.”

“But what happened to the robot?” asked Mowgai. “Did it go back?” and there was something lost and sad in his little face. I remember that, so vividly.

And Elder Simeon shook his head, and smiled, and pointed beyond the house, and he said, “The story says that the manshonyagger, seeing that its young charge was well and sound—and being, as I said, so very tired, too—lay down on the ground, and closed its eyes, and slept. And, some say, is sleeping still.”

We looked where he pointed, and we saw the angled hills, and their curious contours; and if you squinted, and if you looked hard enough, you could just imagine that they took on a shape, as of a sleeping, buried giant.

“But…” I said.

“You don’t—” said Mowgai.

And Elder Simeon smiled again, and shook his head, and said, “But I told you, children. It’s just a story.”

The days grow short, and the shadows lengthen, and I find myself thinking more and more about the past. Mowgai is gone these many years, but I still miss him. That summer, long ago, we spent days upon days hiking through the curious hills, searching and digging, the way children do. We hoped to find a giant robot, and once, just once, we thought we saw a sudden spark of turquoise light, and the outline of a little girl, not much older than we were, looking down on us, and smiling; but it was, I think, just a trick of the light.

Some say the giant’s still there, lying asleep, and that one day it will wake, when it is needed. We spent all that summer, and much of the next, looking for the buried giant; but of course, we never found it.